


Keep Me From Drowning Again (Five Ways)

by poisontaster



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean-Centric, Drabble Sequence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-27
Updated: 2006-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-21 06:08:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4818020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 ways Dean could have drowned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Me From Drowning Again (Five Ways)

**Author's Note:**

> _But if I can't swim after 40 days_  
>  And my mind is crushed  
> By the crashing waves  
> Lift me up so high  
> That I cannot fall  
> Lift me up  
> Lift me up when I'm falling  
> Lift me up I'm weak and I'm dying  
> Lift me up I need you to hold me  
> Lift me up and keep me from drowning again  
> "Flood" by Jars of Clay

**01\. calm the storms that drench my eyes**  
His fingers don't even break the surface now; the nix has pulled him too deep.

He is strangling, its padded cold fingers clutched tight in his collar and everything is rendered in shades of winter blue and blood red. Like his blood. His arms are weak, his legs heavy.

Please, he thinks. Please.

But those are just words. He makes himself pull the silver and star-iron knife from his belt. It's his first kill, but the thought is joyless, even after he flounders to the shore, coughing water that tastes of algae.

He is seven. His mother is still dead.

 

 **02\. dry the streams still flowing**  
You'll thank me later, Dad says and picks Sam up and throws him out, far as he can go. Dean looks up at Dad, worried. Dean learned this way, but Sammy's not like Dean. He doesn't learn like Dean.

After a minute watching Sammy flounder and sink, he can't take any more. Dad shouts _Dean!_ but he dives in and swims to where Sammy's going down again. Sammy latches on like Dean's a life preserver, strangling, and Dean can't hold them both up. He goes under, pushing Sam up, into the sun.

It's okay, Sammy, he says. I got you.

 

 **03\. casting down all waves of sin**  
He drives. He drives miles without seeing any, blinded. He shouldn't have come. California isn't just another state anymore, it's Sam's and nothing's for him here. Only this. Only blind rage that feels like grief.

He parks the car at the edge of a beach somewhere. It's cold. Windy. He leaves his things—gun, knife, jacket, amulet—in the car and wades out into the tide, swimming hard and fast for a nonexistent point on the horizon.

He's too exhausted to swim back. Dean floats. Pretends the saltwater on his face is only the Pacific.

The tide carries him back.

 

 **04\. and guilt that overthrows me**  
He's had too much to drink and quite possibly, he's irrational.

He doesn't think about that.

Instead he sinks deeper in the tub and into the bottle of rum next to him.

Sam is gone. Dad sent him away.

Away, unclean in his eyes as the son who stayed.

He sits in the tub and although the water is long cold and he's used up one bar and another scrubbing the swampy filth and damp smothering heat-sweat of New Orleans off his skin, the rest of his taint stubbornly remains.

Dean sinks below the water and looks up.

Nope. Nothing's clearer.

 

 **05\. my world is a flood**  
They won't let him up. They won't tell him anything.

He doesn't feel too confident about any of it and the third time they tell him his heart stopped 'for just a few seconds', he figures he's got one foot out the door himself. He blames the drugs for the wetness and salt crusted on his eyelashes when he wakes gasping from nightmares that reek of blood and scream with pain.

It's been seventeen days when he wakes up to someone holding his hand. He opens his eyes and Sam is there, murmuring, I got you, Dean. I got you.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for or supernatural100 's prompt #28: Drowning.


End file.
